Reprint
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Why I Write (About Music)
I have two of Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies index cards taped to my monitor. They are supposed to motivate me while slowly radiating guilt. Obliquely, I guess. One reads: Not building a wall, but making a brick (sands, time, hourglass,…
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I Just Want to See It Through: A Full Story from Out of Exile
Alweel’s smile shone and her voice chirped Arabic as she told her story deliberately and in deep detail. We took breaks for chocolate and tea after difficult episodes. It took two days for her to unfurl all of her experiences,…
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Brotherly Love
My old man was like Zeus’s father Cronos: he couldn’t bear the idea that any of his children might surpass him. Life radiated from the central pulse of his scrap-metal yard; the world beyond it seemed to make him defensive…
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Gidget On the Couch
“The thing to remember is that, since 1957, surfing as something you buy has overshadowed surfing as something you do.” An exclusive excerpt on the origins of surfing from the best of the Believer essays, Read Hard.
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Why I Write
It’s natural to want more, to grow, to change, to grow up. But it’s easy to forget why we do what we do.
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Why We Need Health Care Reform
Our nation is now engaged in a great debate about the future of health care in America. And over the past few weeks, much of the media attention has been focused on the loudest voices. What we haven’t heard are…
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Exactly Like Liz Phair, Except Older. And With Hypochondria.
I told myself she reminded me of Liz Phair, but without the marijuana-steeped tomboy, devil-may-care, laid-back attitude of Liz Phair. This is the type of thing you tell yourself when you’re young, or at least when I was young. The…
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The Rumpus Gets Smart: The Definitive Essay on Dudeness
“If you were a man, a real man, you’d slap me.” – ‘Young Hussy’ in the wrestling screenplay of Barton Fink. If the Coen Brothers’ oeuvre might be described as an extended frolic through the archives of film history, it…
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How to Write Sex Scenes: The 12-Step Program
Give us the reddened stubble in the crease of a debutante’s groin, or the minute trembling of a banker’s underlip.
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George Pelecanos’ Favorite Westerns
The Magnificent Seven (1960) A handful of professional gunmen led by black-clad Yul Brynner are hired to protect a south-of-the-border farming village from scores of bandits in John Sturges’ western adaptation of Akira Kurosawa’s The Seven Samurai.
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Unpublished foreword to William Wantling’s 7 on Style [circa 1974]
His writing didn’t contain the trickery and the sheen that the larger American poetry audience demands—and things never became easy for him, that’s why he continued to write very well.
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To Sit, to Stand, to Write
Ever since Nietzsche’s declaration, there has been some disagreement among writers, thinkers, doctors, and designers as to whether inspiration and creativity come from being seated and quiescent, or from being upright and vigorous.